Page 4 of My Neighbor Literally Bites

I turn to the voice, and a man's eyes meet mine. Silver, bright, gorgeous yet intimidating. His black hair falls slightly over his forehead giving him an incredibly handsome look. It's the neighbor. I'm sure of it. He steadies me as though I weigh nothing, and I begin to remove my foot from between the boards. Once I'm stable he lets go and steps back.

My heart misbehaves. "Who are you, and how did you get in my cellar?"

"Alaric Blackwood." His answer is quiet. "Outer door. Doesn't latch." He kneels, examines the broken tread, runs a thumb along the splintered edge. "Rot, not the screw. Whole stringer's soft. This would have happened eventually."

"And you happened to be passing my cellar at night, Mr. Blackwood."

"I saw the light." He says it like it explains everything, and maybe in his world it does. He's already lining up the flashlight on the next tread, testing it. "This one too. And the one above it."

"I can manage my own stairs."

"Clearly." Dry man, but not unkind. The cellar feels smaller for him standing in it. "Replace the stringer before you put weight anywhere on these. I'll send dimensions."

"I didn't ask you to."

"No," he agrees, and that's all. He climbs past me, careful of the rot he already mapped in darkness, and pauses at the top. "Lock the outer door, if it'll hold. Some of them don't, in these old houses."

He disappears leaving me staring where he stood. I move toward the landing and lock the main door with certainty, and sit in bed mulling over what he said.

4

ALARIC

Ileave her in the cellar and don't go home. Tonight, I know the darkness and the night won't hold me. The bond hums deep inside like a struck wire, but it's the other that grinds me down: the certainty, cold and exact, that I am not the only one who has studied this house.

So I search the surroundings. The soil along the wall is disturbed on the far left—not churned by an animal, not scuffed by a wandering boot. There are prints of knees, the impressions paired and even. Someone's weight settled forward and watched. The grass beyond is bent in a line that points, with unkind precision, at Hannah's kitchen window.

I bend over and lay two fingers in the depression. The fence is worse. Third post from the gate, low on the inner face where nobody would ever look, a small notch has been cut into the wood and rubbed dark to keep it from showing. A marker. A range, perhaps, or a count.

Under the hedge I find the wire threaded along the base of the growth where the shadow swallows it. A hair is caught in the twist. Not Hannah's. Not Lily's. Coarse, gray-blond, threaded deliberately through the wire as a tell. Whoever set this trip line wanted to know whether it had been touched. It's been set to tell a careful hand when something crosses. I follow it with my eyes because the sort of person who lays a wire like this also remembers exactly how he left it.

And then, at the old stones near the lilac, footprints. I freeze, there were protections here once. Old ones. Elspeth's, most likely, though she never told me everything she laid into this land. The fact that anyone still tries to cross her when she protected us always upset me. The footprints sit beneath the marker stone, the residue of something burned to test what the burning would wake.

The vampires that tried to harm her always took it a step too far, but this is fresh. They know what this house used to hold. It doesn't hold it anymore, and they haven't stopped.

I straighten and let the night settle around me. Whoever moves here understands sightlines, and patience, and the soft places around a household. They avoid the obvious paths. They kneel instead of stride. They mark wood instead of breaking it. This is no thief. I don't finish the thought. There is no profit in finishing it tonight. What I can finish is the stair.

I go back to the cellar from the outside—an offense I have already named to her and intend to remedy whether she permits it or not. The split step waits where I left it, splintered along the rot. I have watched enough wood die to know what killed this one.

I work fast, and quietly while the two females sleep upstairs. Pulling the ruined board, bracing the stringer, fitting new wood I carried from my own workshop, and sinking the fasteners by feel. The wood takes the screws clean. When I press my weight against the step, it holds without complaint.

"You're really bad at being a burglar."

I turn.

The girl stands three steps up, arms folded, an unlit flashlight in one hand. The daughter, Lily. Dark hair down, pajamas, bare feet, and not one trace of fear on her face. She should be afraid. A strange man, a dark cellar, but she's more defiant.

"You don't fix what you came to steal," she says. "First rule."

"I'll remember it."

"Most people, you catch them somewhere they shouldn't be, they jump." She tips her head. "You didn't."

"I heard you on the stairs," I lie.

"I came down the quiet way."

"There isn't one of those."